A psychologist discusses the best self-help literature for life and practice.

11/01/2011

Rick Blum's Gift to Therapists

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice: How to Best Serve Your Clients While Maximizing Your Professional Freedom (2011, The Paradoxical Press) is psychologist Rick Blum's testimonial on building and maintaining a successful cash practice during the managed-care era. While this book is aimed at all licensed mental health professionals, it comes at a moment when many private-practice psychologists are in an existential crisis. Do we succumb to what seems like a gradual de-professionalization through drastically lowered insurance reimbursement rates? Should we fight/negotiate for more? Will we have to perhaps go to work in settings we are not as well suited to, to make ends meet? Blum does not attack this environmental pressure directly. He uses the force of its momentum to make a point about private practice psychotherapy: ultimately, you are in charge of how you practice.

This is really a book about working in our field with integrity and thriving because of it. To do that, these days, you need to understand the true value of what you do by being in touch with your philosophical/spiritual essence. Then, you have to act in all of your roles according to these real values, be it with clients, case managers, paperwork or fee setting. He uses his own practice/metaphor of Aikido to illustrate this. It is really a rare window into a practice that rests on deep caring, genuine knowledge, and coherent method.

The book has another aspect to it that should appeal to graduate students and trainees not yet licensed, who may be considering a private practice career. He goes into great detail about the quality of his interactions with clients, sharing more than many of one's clinical supervisors ever will. Indeed, Blum has taught and supervised in a humanist vein for some time. His approach is nonetheless more integrative than psychotherapy research is generally comfortable with. But it is far more like what most clinicians actually do, and find works, in the real world.

If you are just looking for some quick tips on how to shift to a cash practice--and you work in a region that is not too competitive--you can certainly skip to the last part of the book and try out some of his ideas. But deciding you are worth such a shift in your relationship to the psychotherapy market, and then behaving as though you are, involves an organic process that might be helped by examining Blum's successful example in its entirety.

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice is available in paperback at Amazon.com.